11 Wednesday Jun 2008
Posted in Music
Jem has finally announced here follow up to 2004’s Finally Woken album. Finally Woken with its Dido-esque styling is probably best known for the albums’ title track and ‘They’ along with the song Madonna recorded ‘Nothing Fails’ which appeared on the American Life album.
The new album ‘Down To Earth’ is to be released in September, with an initial song (Down To Earth) from it appearing on soundtrack to the current Sex In The City film soundtrack.
website – http://www.jem-music.net/
05 Thursday Jun 2008
Posted in Music
Crawdaddy have a fascinating article describing the lyrical origins of Iggy Pop’s most famous anthem – I Wanna Be Your Dog. An interesting and worthwhile read.
04 Wednesday Jun 2008
Posted in Music
The Details of Ray LaMontagne’s next album have been announced. The album is to be called Gossip In The Grain and will be released on 9th September 2008. Produced by Ethan Johns at the Realworld Studios. Unlike the first two albums Ray is backed by some of his live touring band.
Websites – http://www.raylamontagne.com/ http://www.facebook.com/raylamontagne
02 Monday Jun 2008
Posted in Music, Technology
According to Digital Music News, MediaDefender an anti-piracy company has used an illegal means to try an shutdown what is a legitimate online media selling service Revision3. Revision3 legally uses bit torrent technologies and as a result of a security hole had servers tricked into acting as a tracker for some illegal content, setup up by MediaDefender by exploiting a security hole according to Revision3. When Revision3 spotted the abuse and shutout MediaDefender it appears to have triggered a denial of service attack (achieved by saturating a web server with too many requests for content). So Revision3’s actions which were correctly taken to prevent their servers from being exploited and used for illegal copying (also the the job of MediaDefender) resulted in the service attack. Reviosn3 has a good description of what the DOS attack is like.
Given MediaDefender’s failure to atleast talk with Revision3 let alone use correct legal channels, has been referred the matter to the FBI as it breaks 12 different statutes including Computer Fraud and Misuse act. Revision3’s news article on the whole event is fascinating insight into how blasé MediaDefender about its actions. Since the attack, MediaDefender have said they’ve updated their policies to first check to see if the server they’re looking at is associated to a legitimate business. Hey, shouldn’t you have been doing that anyway? As Revision3 had said, what if someone had exploited an loophole in security for an emergency service to host a bit torrent tracker which had then been attacked by MediaDefender?
Interestingly most of the information describing what has gone on has come from Revision3, and MediaDefender’s website is particularly quiet on these events.
02 Monday Jun 2008
Posted in Music
Sigur Ros are following what seems to becoming a common pattern of giving away a free download single to help promote a new album. The new single Gobbledigook can be downloaded as a high quality MP3 from their site – Sigur Ros. The new album is scheduled for release on June 23rd in the UK. Sigur Ross also have a website at http://www.sigur-ros.co.uk/.
27 Tuesday May 2008
Posted in economy
Protests over fuel prices are starting to kick in again, with a number of convoys around the country on a go slow impacting traffic. More details at BBC NEWS. According to the BBC …
Treasury spokesman said the government understood business and families were “feeling the pressure from high fuel prices”.
But they said the “immediate priority” was to encourage oil-producing countries to increase output, that a 2p-per-litre fuel duty increase had been put back from April to October and fuel duty was “still 11% below its 1999 level, in real terms”.
The fact that the prices are 11% less in real terms, is misses the most crucial the point, which is the rate of change that is the problem, and that if fuel prices are to rapidly correct based on that real terms figures is going to really hit inflation.
27 Tuesday May 2008
Posted in Music
The UK organisations responsible for collecting music royalties have reported here that they have had a record year in collected royalties. Although royalties from physical media sales have dropped by 10% everything else (e.g. public performance, downloads and so on) have been increasing in or near double digit rates giving an overall growth of 3%. The report says …
For the first time, income from broadcasting and online out-performed that of recorded physical product. Online royalties, although still a small proportion of the overall whole (at £10m), grew significantly by 54% year-on-year, largely due to the growth in the legal online music market led by iTunes.
A picture that isn’t too gloomy given the current global economic down turn, although this is only really good news for the artists and composers rather than the record labels themselves.
27 Tuesday May 2008
Posted in Books, Music, Photography
Wired.com have got a neat little article here about the Hotel Chelsea in NYC. This notorious venue perhaps most famous as the location where Sid Vicious allegedly killed his girlfriend Nancy Spungen, but also the home for a raft of other sordid stories (and a few less sordid such as Arthur C Clarke’s writing of 2001). The hotel is now the subject to a documentary film and photo essay book.
23 Friday May 2008
Posted in Music
Having only recently released his covers album – “On Your Sleeve“, Jesse Malin is now putting out another live album on June 3rd called “Mercury Retrograde“. The album is getting a limited CD release, and will be generally available through iTunes. The album has 16 tracks recorded Christmas last year at New York’s Mercury Lounge.
21 Wednesday May 2008
Posted in economy
The Telegraph a running a campaign with a petition to get the 2p price rise scheduled for October on fuels stopped, and to take actions to slow the rate that fuel prices are increasing. As you’ll have seen by my previous posts fuel costs are increasing at whole percentage points per month (rather than per year) at the moment. PetrolPrices.com have a range of figures reporting fuel prices as high as £1.37 per litre in parts of the country. Although the principal to slowly increase taxation on fuel to help fund public transport and encourage green activity maybe fun, the current rate of change is starting to make a notable impact on inflation, sufficiently so that it has the Mervyn King the head of the Bank of England has identified it as a factor on any number of occasions now.
The campaign includes a petition here which you may wish to sign.
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